


you're my beginning (and my end)

by estel_willow



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst, Happy Ending, M/M, alex is an unreliable narrator, alex is not kind to himself, sort of a five times thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-25
Updated: 2019-05-25
Packaged: 2020-03-17 13:11:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18965908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/estel_willow/pseuds/estel_willow
Summary: One touch from Michael at the tapestry of his fabricated falsehood unravelled rapidly, leaving Alex grasping at increasingly disparate pieces of himself, the person he used to be warring with the person he was warring with the person he wanted to be.





	you're my beginning (and my end)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SaadieStuff](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaadieStuff/gifts).



> Based off the prompt " **Whelve;** _to bury something deep, to hide_ " over on tumblr from [SaadieStuff](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaadieStuff/works).
> 
> I played a little loose with the idea, but I hope you enjoy it anyway! <3

  **i.**

Repression was something Alex Manes had become excellent at. The blossom of heat in his chest and his face whenever he saw Kyle Valenti had been pushed away and boxed down so deeply that it couldn’t resurface and Alex was sure that he’d never feel that way again until a curly-haired boy stole his guitar to get his attention and Alex was _lost_.

He fell for Michael Guerin hard and fast; his love was a base-jump without a parachute, plummeting towards the earth with no fear of crashing because the cushion of the imaginary arms would make it better. His Box of Feelings was bursting at the seams, lid wonky and off-set, the parts of him that he wanted to conceal pouring out of him through cracks in the pavement of his heart. Michael was in the music he played, even before they’d kissed for the first time. Michael was in the air he breathed and in the scratch of the pen Michael chewed when they were in calculus and he was bored because he’d already done the work. Michael was in every beat of Alex’s heart and every scar on his soul and when they kissed that night in the UFO Emporium some part of Alex that had been crying out for acceptance his whole life sang. His harmony was completed and when they stumbled together bright and joyful into the toolshed, mindless - thoughtless - of the danger that would bring, Alex felt completed.

After the toolshed, Michael pulled away. Alex understood; he would have done too even if every part of him was crying out to make it better, to soothe the pain, to hold Michael and tell him that he didn’t care what his father said. He never had done before. But Michael had drifted, distant and angry and hurting and Alex realised that if he stayed in Roswell he’d have to face his father and brothers and the knowledge that Jesse Manes had snapped the symphony that he and Michael had written, permanently scarred it and that things would never be the same and though he could stuff his feelings back into their box it would never truly be smothered even if he watched Michael move on. He looked the Air Force recruitment officer in the eye and signed himself up, feeling the clapping of a palm on his shoulder that was gentle and firm in all the ways it never was when Jesse Manes laid hands.

In the Air Force, Alex repressed again. He closed his eyes and breathed and boxed himself away, closed himself down and pushed the parts of him that bled and ached for individuality aside, slammed everything into his Box of Feelings and ignoring it. He boxed away the raw pain of Michael that tried to scream out whenever he saw someone with curls in their hair or sunlight in their eyes. He boxed away the shame at never having been able to protect someone who had needed it, at having frozen in fear when Jesse Manes took a hammer to Michael’s hand and painted the walls with blood and screams, splattered his face with warm wetness that took hours to feel that he was fully clean of. He boxed away the way that Barnes’ ABUs clung to his ass or the bright way that he grinned with a tongue touching his canine and a perpetual expression of mischief on his face which made his chest and face feel hot, pulse sticking in his throat. He boxed away the parts of him that desired attention and wanted to talk with the boys about men, the way they talked about women. He boxed away the realisation that he’d never walk the same again after his leg was amputated. He boxed away the knowledge that he’d always be the purple heart veteran now, the one who was discharged because he was disabled, defined by his achievements fighting the Government’s war. He boxed away the white-hot anger that sparked in him when he realised that people would look at him with pity for as long as he had that stupid crutch.

Repression was something Alex Manes had become excellent at.

At least, that was what he told himself, even as he felt like he was always bleeding.

 

**ii.**

Roswell was a crash landing. The first time he saw Michael at the trailer, Alex felt his Box of Feelings beginning to crack. Smothered in concrete and buried in the desert, the way his name fell of Michael’s lips caused sunlight to start streaming out of the cracks, jolting parts of Alex that he’s shoved aside and tried to ignore to be the person the Government needed him to be. The person that the Air Force needed him to be. One touch from Michael at the tapestry of his fabricated falsehood unravelled rapidly, leaving Alex grasping at increasingly disparate pieces of himself, the person he used to be warring with the person he was warring with the person he wanted to be.

He and Michael collided at the reunion, helplessly pulled together like opposing poles, tangled up inextricably in nostalgia and history and need. Michael pushed and Alex pulled and they danced a dance they shouldn’t know as well as they did, but the steps were natural. They moved like a sonata, a brutal allegro that was triggered by _I never look away_ and the sun on his hair and the universe in his eyes and the cosmic catastrophe of tool shed wasn’t forgotten but it could be misplaced temporarily when Michael’s body covered his and he got to sink his fingers into those curls and just _hold on holdonholdon_ as they climbed to a crescendo together. Again and again and again. And with each euphoric wave, Alex could feel the cracks getting bigger, sunlight and moonlight pouring from the broken, ragged edges of the places Alex hid himself away and he felt it starting to burn away the dark edges of him that smothered the brightness of the person he used to be.

Coming back to Roswell was a crash landing.

Alex hadn’t expected to implode upon impact.

 

**iii.**

The universe was unforgiving. Alex knew this from a very young age when the man who was supposed to give him unconditional love and support struck him. When the woman who gave him life didn’t look back when she walked away. When the siblings he admired did nothing lest they become the subject of their father’s wrath and one by one they, too, fled to fold and fit the form of the man their father expected them to be. A Real Manes Man.

He’d noticed it before, a shadow of Jesse Manes, in the way he held his head up. The way he stared down the enemy. The way that he calculated the best possible outcome and took decisive action, not allowing doubt to creep in. In never second guessing something when he’d made his mind up. In ensuring that whatever the outcome, it was the right one. It was the one that was needed, even if the actions undertaken were things that made him struggle to sleep at night. 

He’d noticed it before. He’d noticed it the curve of his jaw, sometimes in the set of his eyes. But some time between crashing back to Roswell (and Michael, always Michael because everything comes back to _Michael_ ) and the explosion of Caulfield and the knowledge that his father destroyed the only other man Alex had ever looked up to, he’d stopped seeing himself at all. The nightmarish realisation that he was part of a legacy of genocide. That legacy that had Michael wild-eyed and unresponsive in the back of the humvee as they drove back to Roswell, the world on fire behind them.

Alex broke all the mirrors in his house. He went to the Airstream and sat in the dark, fingers laced together, running his apology and declaration over and over in his mind, using the time to force the rampant ugliness of his soul back into his Box of Feelings, cracked and clouded in shadows and doubt, the inescapable knowledge that if he saw Jesse Manes when he looked at himself, if he saw the crack of a hammer and the spiderweb of glass, if he saw the blare of a claxon and the white-hot fire of a failsafe... what did Michael see?

Confessions spilled out of him, desperate and ragged, _I don’t even see myself_ , and Michael looked at him, gentle and understanding but still distant, wild and wired. Blood-soaked - and Alex knew it was his but he hadn’t been able to see an injury - and battered by the storm, the promise of tomorrow stumbled out of Michael’s lips and Alex just nodded. Promised to come back. To be ready.

But Michael didn’t come back and as Alex sat and waited he couldn’t resist the impulse to GPS ping Michael’s phone.

The Wild Pony.

Maria.

Alex felt his box cave in, a sudden nuclear implosion of _toolatejessemanestoolate_ and he closes his eyes.

The universe was unforgiving, it warped your demons and breathed life into them until they stared at you when you looked in the mirror and were forced to face your own reflection.

The universe was unforgiving. It made you look like someone you weren’t, in the eyes of the only person you wanted to love you and forced them into the arms of someone else, leaving you alone in the midday sun, forced to face yourself.

 

**iv.**

Repression is something Alex Manes has become excellent at.

At least, that was what he tells himself.

He’s the master of putting things away and shoving them into the dark recesses of his soul. The worst pain, he knows, isn’t physical. There’s an exquisitely torturous pain in seeing the man that he’s loved since before he even knew how all-consuming it would be holding hands with someone else, leaning in and brushing his nose over their temple and laughing as they turn into him. He’s not seen that brightness in Michael for a long time, and certainly not when they were together. There’s a soul-destroying truth in knowing that he isn’t the one. He isn’t _cosmic_. He isn’t the answer to the equation of Michael’s soul, the response to Michael’s scream into the void. He’s not the answer. He’s an echo. He’s an echo of the pain, of the trauma. He’s a sharp reminder of all the things that could have been. An eternity of something almost. Something that could have been beautiful but was broken and brutalised before they were even men.

Alex knows it isn’t all his fault. He can’t control the things his family did. But he caused hurt by walking away, by letting the demons the universe had allowed to grow inside of him, stoked by the fire of his father’s fury, get the better of him. To make him doubt and walk away when all he’d ever wanted to do was _stay_.

He pushes the pain somewhere where he can’t feel it anymore, shoves it deep inside of himself and locks it away. He uses it as a reminder to do better, to be better, to be someone who wouldn’t remind Michael of the pain and the tears and the fury. To be someone who would make Michael smile in the same way he did when he was pressing a kiss to the curve of Maria’s neck behind the bar at the Pony, causing her to laugh softly and swat at him with a dishcloth, her laugh bright like a bell, her joy bright like a flame.

Alex watches and he burns and he buries himself in his Box of Feelings. He patches up the fractured sides that burst open at the touch of Michael’s lips to his jaw. He plasters over the cracks that formed when Michael’s fingers curled around his hips and pulled him close. He wedges on the lid that popped off when Michael looked at him in the soft morning light and whispered _you stayed_ like it was the only thing he’d ever wanted, and Alex had given him the gift of a thousand sunrises. He forces his feelings further down, twists them and bends them into something that tastes like acceptance and stings like sorrow. They’re supposed to brush against the fingertips of his soul like resignation and acceptance but they come out spiked with sharp defiance.

Repression is something Alex Manes has become excellent at.

He doesn’t want to be good at it anymore.

 

**v.**

The first time Michael kissed him, Alex felt infinity. It tasted like hello, the unfolding possibility of forever etched on his lips. It’s a lie to say that he’s chased that feeling ever since because he hasn’t; Alex knows that there’s nothing else like Michael. No one else could possibly kiss him in the way that Michael does. Did. No one else could possibly kiss like they’re trying to give Alex their _everything_ in a touch.

When things with Maria shatter, stuttering to a violent and abrupt ending as the lies got too much and Michael’s hatred of secrets caused him to spill everything to her in a fountain of truth. Roswell becomes the site of the crash landing of their relationship as it burns and smoulders in a blazing encore when she finds out that he’d always loved Alex. The alien revelation was one thing, the cover-up of Rosa’s death another, but the real nail in the coffin, the hammer to the mockery of a relationship that had been scraped together by Michael was the knowledge that Maria DeLuca was second best to someone else. Maria DeLuca, she had told Michael with a jab at his chest, is no one’s second choice. And she’s right. They all know it and she’s angry at them all for letting her humiliate herself when they all knew better. She closes the Pony for a week and shuts them all out.

Alex doesn’t let himself stutter in hope when he goes to see Michael, dragging him out of Saturn’s Rings when he’d had one too many. He doesn’t let himself open to the possibility of something more when he hauls Michael out of the drunk tank the morning after the night before, when Michael looks at him with a hungover, dopey smile, eyes sliding up him like he’s being weight and judged with a look that somehow manages to mix sex and lust and need and sadness together and Alex forces himself not to react. Not to Michael’s soft smile and flirtatious comments. Not to the way Michael leans heavily against him when they spill out of Alex’s Volvo. Not to the way that he can feel Michael’s breath curling over his ear and the gentle rumble of _you comin’ in, Private?_ every time. Not to the way that Michael’s eyes shutter and the hurt crosses his face when Alex replies, every time, _I can’t, Guerin, and you know it._

He doesn’t let himself stutter in hope after he hands the ship piece to Michael after fighting with him, spit and fury. _Pull your shit together, Guerin. Max and Isobel need you,_ he’d snapped, snarled, anger pulled from his chest because Michael’s better than the spiral he’s stuck in. He’s better than being arrested three times a week. He’s better than the wrecked mess he’s making of his life and Alex doesn’t understand why when he has siblings that need him, when he has people that care about him. _It’s not them I need_ Michael had retorted, hot and hurting, loose items wobbling around them in the wake of Michael’s pain, raw and laid out between them. _It’s never been them that I’ve needed, Alex._

He doesn’t let himself stutter in hope when Michael stands in front of him and puts the ship piece aside and says that there’s no point in leaving because there’s no planet to go to. There’s no home for him except the one that doesn’t want him and Alex can’t reply because he can’t breathe. Michael’s open and broken and in the silence that hangs between them he reads the wrong thing into it and Alex can see the walls rising again, brick by brick he watches Michael trying to pull the shattered shards of himself whole again. Michael’s pieces don’t want to be together. They want to be with Alex. Their broken pieces want to curl around each other and fuse into something better than their separate wholes, broken things patched and mended with a kiss of gold to make something beautiful.

The first time Michael kissed him, Alex felt infinity. It tasted like hello, the unfolding possibility of forever etched on his lips.

The first time Alex kisses Michael, after months of trying to tell himself that it’s better if they stay friends, if they never cross that line again, he feels infinity. Michael doesn’t taste like hello this time, he tastes like home. He tastes like _forever_. Alex’s fingers push into his curls and Michael opens for him like a sunflower, the shard forgotten on the floor as Michael’s fingers catch on his jeans, tugging him in and their bodies meet in a dance they’ve always known the steps to but spent the last few years out of synch.

 

**+1**

“I spent so long,” Alex breathes against the sharp angle of Michael’s collarbone, “trying to just- forget.”

Michael snorts, lifting his head to look at Alex and he presses a kiss to the top of Alex’s head, fingers playing a silent melody up the line of Alex’s spine in a way that makes goosebumps spread over his skin.

“I figured I could bury it.” Now he’s started talking, he can’t stop. Michael’s truth always falls from him without reservation, with desperate abandon he’s always thrown his truths at anyone who’ll listen in the hopes that someone will _stay_. Alex is done running. He’s done being a disappointment to someone that deserves more from him than he can really give but he’ll do his best. “Push it somewhere so far away I couldn’t feel it anymore. I got good at ignoring things.”

“Alex-” he starts and when Alex looks at him, Michael’s got that fond _you’re an idiot_ expression on his face, the same one he’d worn when Alex had told him that he felt seventeen, the same one he’d worn when Alex had said that he saw his father, the same expression he’d worn when Alex had told him _I’ve tried to let you move on, I’ve tried to do it myself but I can’t. I don’t want to. I never want to move on from you, Guerin and that- if you want to, I need you to look me in the eye and tell me that so I know it’s real. So I know._  The same expression that he’d worn after they’d collided together in a kiss that tasted like forever.

“Don’t- just let me finish. I’m good at repressing things. I got good at thinking the universe was doing whatever it wanted to fuck things up for me because it’s unfair and unforgiving. I got good at blaming myself for- for things that’re out of my control.” He pushes himself up a little, hesitates for only a second before he’s shifting, straddling Michael’s hips and smiling when Michael’s fingers slide up his thighs, continuing the silent symphony against his skin, the maestro of sparks that shuddered up along Alex’s synapses with each touch, orchestrating sensations that mean Alex struggles to concentrate on anything but the way his skin responds to Michael. “And I- I want this.”

He hears Michael’s breath catching, his curls halo his head on the pillow and his eyes, liquid caramel-gold are wide and bright, tentative hope springing somewhere over his expression that makes him look almost boyish and Alex is struck with such a rush of _love_ that his Box shatters, obliterated by the push of fingers up his side, skating over his ribs, when he realises he’s never said that aloud to Michael before.

“I want this, ” he repeats, fingers hooking around his jaw, cupping the back of his head, drawing him down into a kiss, “ _Michael.”_

Michael laughs and kisses him again and Alex goes willingly, catching Michael’s lower lip between his teeth and tugging gently, gaze shifting up when they break for air to the bedside table, top drawer, where a small box sits with a ring inside of it, waiting for the right moment.

Repression might be something that Alex Manes is good at, but when it comes to Michael Guerin, he’s never going to do it again.

 

**Author's Note:**

> ps. the tense shift was purposeful, it took me by surprise as I was writing but hey. Story's gonna do what a story's gonna do.


End file.
